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First time accepted submitter AnOminusCowHerd (3399855) writes "I have an Associates degree in programming and systems analysis, and over a decade of experience in the field. I work primarily as a contractor, so I'm finding a new job/contract every year or two. And every year, it gets harder to convince potential employers/clients that 10-12 years of hands-on experience doing what they need done, trumps an additional 2 years of general IT education.

So, I'd like to get a Bachelor's degree (preferably IT-related, ideally CS, accredited of course). If I can actually learn something interesting and useful in the process, that would be a perk, but mainly, I just want a BSCS to add to my resume. I would gladly consider something like the new GA Tech MOOC-based MSCS degree program — in fact, I applied there, and was turned down. After the initial offering, they rewrote the admissions requirements to spell out the fact that only people with a completed 4-year degree would be considered, work experience notwithstanding."

ESI ! I'm an alumnus. But I went back when it was only $99.95 (plus 29.95 for a "sealer" coat). Problem with that is I assume he wants a lifetime degree, and Earl's only lasts you about 3 years. Also, at least in the past, you had to choose one of the colors, er, disciplines, they already offered. No design-your-own interdisciplinary resprays, um, degrees.

Ask them for a list of colleges and universities that accept their courses as transfer credit. Don't want to redo work you've already done.

If your associate's place doesn't transfer anywhere at all, the good news is that your options are all open, and the bad news is that you'll have to do two years of work over again. (The other bad news is that it's a sign that no other college likes the college you got your 2 year degree from, for some reason, which either speaks to the quality of education that you

Also, the bad news is that the Admissions office is usually more generous about transfers than the Records office. Once you get there, you may find that your credits don't transfer as well as they led you to believe before you got there.

Even if only half the credits transfer over, that's still less work that needs to be done - and less you have to pay for. If the originating associate's degree was worth the paper it was printed on, they'll probably let you transfer over credits from the core classes (English 101, basic math etc.)

He should also be aware that some schools will discount the value of old credits. Requiring testing (at least) for coursework more then 5 or 10 years old.

Further he should look for flexibility in testing for industry experience. It really sucks taking a class in a subject you know better then the teacher. Imagine taking a database course from a teacher that loves higher normal forms (read as: 'has never run a real world database').

The other bad news is that it's a sign that no other college likes the college you got your 2 year degree from, for some reason, which either speaks to the quality of education that you received or to some underlying college political issue, and you won't know which without digging a bit

Even within schools accredited by the same agency, some will not accept transfers from others because the schools themselves are run by different organizations. For example, in Georgia the "University System of Georgia" is different from the "Technical College System of Georgia." (GA Tech is part of the University System, so school names mean nothing.) Most USG schools will accept partial transfer credits from each other, but they'll snub the TCSG schools and may transfer little or nothing, even though m

Apply to a local state funded university. Talk with an admissions counselor about your goals and how well your associates will transfer (10 years old, the answer is usually Not At All). State schools provide the best bang for the buck. It also helps that their programs tend to be quite good. You also have to accept the fact that this isn't going to be convenient or easy. If it was easy to get a degree worth the paper it was printed on, everybody would have one.

Hi, I want to pretend that I've done a bunch of academic learning, because I feel that I have the right to the title because I have some experience.

Hint: Bachelors degrees are different from experience. Experience is valuable, but it's not the same thing as academic learning, in the same way as academic learning is valuable, but not the same thing as experience. If you want a bachelor's degree... go and do one.

I have met a number of people who are rock solid programmers and have a deep understanding of technologies. People who can program device drivers in their sleep and have implemented a godawful number of systems over the years. People who have licked networking or embedded systems or whatever (take your pick).

Naturally, they assume that CS is the same as IT, and enter CS programs to get a degree.

And then, I have seen them fail miserably as they realize that programming does not equal discrete math, graph theory, or computational complexity. Usually, it's been a while since they've been out of school, so even simple things like Graphics 101 with vector math and basic physics isn't quite a cakewalk. Plus, I have found that they are quite limited by their own experience and biases (mostly because they've had a lifetime to learn bad habits) and find it quite hard to reconcile real world experience with the academia.

You can especially see this with older, more experienced folks in a class teaching, say, Operating Systems, Architecture, Data Structures, or Compiler Design. And it is not necessarily their fault -- their real world experience sometimes does contradict what's recommended in the "ivory tower" world. Networking is often quite the opposite, though -- it is one of those fields where real world experience proves valuable, and the experienced folks learn a little something about the math behind network routing and such.

Honestly, whenever I see someone with experience wanting to study CS, I just recommend that they get a degree in something like MIS simply because it is a way for you to move up, and it is a lot easier -- handing computer science at a later stage in your life is usually significantly harder unless you've been keeping yourself mentally challenged in math and related subjects. You are in a very different place mentally in your early 30s than you are in your late teens.

Very true but you can still teach an old dog new tricks. I went back to school for the third time to get my under graduate coursework in CS out of the way so I can apply to a MS program when my youngest starts 1st grade (in about three years). I started taking CS classes in my late 30's and have 2 more courses to go and I am now in my 40's with 2 kids. What I found is that even though I have a minor in Mathematics it provided me almost no help in Discrete Math. Honestly Discrete Math taken at a large engineering university was an eye opening experience for me. The only thing that helped me was Linear Algebra and some graph theory I already knew. And it really made me angry that the US education system had shorted me so severely on what I would call classic mathematics. To catch up I put in many, many hours to do well in that class. And I did OK with with a B+. Going back to doing proofs after 20 years was a a challenge but it was not impossible. I already have a MS in Computer Information Systems but my heart is in Computer Science and so is the type of work that I do. You can take challenging courses later in life and I think it can be very rewarding. In my Data Structures class the final project was an impossible task for undergraduates. I spent hours working on the project which combined graph theory, and many different data structures and related concepts into a large final class project. I put the effort in and got a 100 on the assignment along with a single fellow classmate also in his 30's taking coursework for another masters program. We both got A+ grades in that class. The class average for that assignment was a 45 which included our two perfect scores. I then went on to take Computer Architecture and Assembler programming and had a similar experience. The undergraduate kids did pretty well on the tests and it was difficult to beat them but when it came to the projects the older students like myself could beat them hands down. We simply have many more years of experience in building things that work as well as tenacity in completing the projects to our best ability. It takes a lot of work to go back to school and complete challenging coursework but I personally have found it very rewarding.

This is very true. In my experience, actual work is about getting the job done well enough to serve a particular purpose while academic work was more likely to require delving deeper. The deeper academic delving sometimes really pays off when the real job requires just getting something to work right, right now.

Do you omit the degrees from your resume, or do you have an education section on your resume which says you have them? Using them may be subtle, but if you keep it on your resume then you do use it. Not to be confused with flaunting it or waving it in people's faces. I use my degrees on my resume, and don't flaunt them. I will answer people when they ask, but to me experience has been more valuable to my career than my degree. My degree is Math, yet I work in CS. That used to the the way of things lon

My school (University of Cincinnati) requires all engineering grads to have 1.5 years of industry experience (co-op) to graduate. That means that you get paid for 1.5 years at a decent rate and likely will have an offer at graduation. Worked great for me, though, it does require a 5 year program to complete. Regardless, you get a solid grasp of the fundamentals and a job.

But not wasting your time... I'm all for a solid CS education and I'd give brownie points for it. But if it bugs you to study what you think you already know, then don't. I really can't imagine that a BS in CS is going to impress most hiring managers more than your dozen years of experience plus some other 4 year degree. So get the 4 year degree in something else quantitative in which you have interest. Physics, statistics, math, chemistry, etc. Take your time, and enjoy learning something outside of your normal field.

every year, it gets harder to convince potential employers/clients that 10-12 years of hands-on experience doing what they need done, trumps an additional 2 years of general IT education.

Both are pretty meaningless if you don't actually have the necessary knowledge to do the job properly. There are plenty of people with degrees that don't know anything. There are plenty of people with lots of experience that don't know anything. I know lots of people who talk a good game, and can't deliver. There are plenty of people paying for software development that don;t know what good software is, and that's what allows these hacks to survive. The fact that you want to get a BS in computer science with doing the least amount of effort, makes me not want to hire you. What it says to me, is that you don't think the knowledge gained by going through a real CS program is very important. There is also quite a difference in quality between "accredited" computer science programs, and most employers are aware this difference. Maybe you think you know the material already, but I have literally never seen a single "self-taught" person who knew a damn about proper software engineering. Maybe you are a genius and an exception, but I also wouldn't take the word of some self-proclaimed CS/IT genius. Everyone who does computers thinks their a genius, myself included. It's a psychological disorder that's rampant in the field.

Don't be surprised if a fastest cheapest accredited degree (i.e. where you learn the least), doesn't yield the results you were hoping for.

I've always wondered what it is that prevents us from creating a fully accredited* Computer Science Degree (bachelor's) completely online, for cheap. I'm not talking code-school, I mean let's learn Computer Science, with all the math and non-shortcuts that entails. The "industry" might want programmers, but *I* want to be more than that, and I'd like a formal education to get it without spending $30-40k/semester and would prefer to do it at my own pace while I continue working in the field. Perhaps this needs to be a Y Combinator style start-up. Courses from Algebra (yes, Algebra), Geometry, Trig, first principles kind of stuff focusing on the WHYS not just rote memorization. Sure, you'd still need the social sciences and what not (and I would be happy to just take those at the local community college for $cheap and transfer them in), but the real meat at the real school. Hell, it doesn't even have to be accredited if you actually learn something.

This also brings me to self-taught computer scientists: I've begun an adventure down "Teach myself math from scratch" lane because, at age 40, I'm still rather annoyed at my math education in high school. I was more concerned about learning to the test, not the concepts, and that's haunted me ever since. Anyone have recommendations for learning math starting from, say, Algebra I or II level (high school) that will actually teach in a way that will be useful rather than taking a test? Stuff that will carry over into future classes as the proper building blocks, etc?

It's a master's degree program from what I can tell. I'd rather start at the undergraduate level. What's sad is that even though I denigrate my math skills/comprehension I've still probably forgotten more than most non-STEM people have ever learned. SIGH.

What does it mean when your biggest regret from high school at age 40 is I wish I hadn't slept through Algebra II & Advanced Math instead of "I wish I had asked Suzy out" or, I dunno, gone out for the wrestling team?:)

Even if he declined to accept any offers obtained by lying about a degree, it would be interested to see if it helped him to get more offers. As it stands, it could be anything - a declining market in his technical specialty, or in the region where he lives, or a slip in the freshness of his skills, or age discrimination.

Get a degree in Electrical Engineering from your nearest State University, filling all your elective credits with Computer Science courses.

Gets you access to all those "4 year degree" tech jobs, plus a whole slew of other tech jobs that you didn't know existed. That's what I did because I didn't want to pigeonhole myself into a field that is rife with bubbles and outsourcing. Worse case scenario, if at some point I can't find work writing code, I can try to get a job with the power company, a telco, etc.

Wherever you get your degree, don't run up a fortune in debt to pay for it. It would be better to not get it at all then to run up, say, $30,000 or more of debt to pay off - in my opinion. I do agree with you that it probably really is harder and harder to get jobs without a 4 year degree. I've seen this happen to IT people I know who don't have 4 year degrees and get laid off.

This is, without a doubt, the fastest way to get your bachelor's degree. You can study at your own pace, and you can take tests for materials that you already know without investing time into the studies.

A lot of government research entities will pay for your advanced education (Georgia Tech Research Institute, Sandia Labs, etc) because they value advanced degrees. I know this works great getting MS degrees. You just have to sell your soul to the same company usually for an additional 4 years.
I recommend you just get a BS degree with a decent in-state public school. Usually you can help pay for tuition by working for the school as a TA or Research Assistant.

Get a job doing support, call center, help desk, whatever, with a company that has tuition reimbursement. Get most of it done at a community college as they are usually easier & better schedule wise for the working adult. Just be sure it has a transfer program to a state college so your degree has a better name on it. This worked well for me.

I hired a guy who was in a small time band for 20 years after high school. Traveled all over US. No one ever paid an admission price to hear them. Hotel lobby. Restaurant. Etc. Decided to get a degree at age 40. 20 years of travel showed him the cheapest place in USA. Upper peninsula of Michigan. Mich tech or some such place. Finished degree in three years with summer session. Started as entry level coder at age 44. One of the smartest guys I have met. He joined and enjoyed our London times cryptic crossword puzzle group.
So go north young man.

I once interviewed for one of the big investment banks (not gonna give a name, but its one of the big evil wall street banks that everyone knows about). That one has the usual silly "4 year degree with 3.0 GPA or we don't even talk to you, no exception, not even if you're a well known superstar in the software world" rule.

I didn't know that, and I only have a 3 year degree (from a country where thats common). I aced the interview as that particular job wasn't even very computer science-ish, and they had been looking for someone for months to fill that position. Then they noticed the little issue of me not having the mandatory degree.

The hiring manager (not someone from an agency, but someone on their payroll) just modified my resume without telling me and passed it over to HR for final signoff. I got hired.

Fast forward a year, they're updating the HRIS system and verifying that all the info is correct. I get an email from HR asking me to confirm that I indeed have a 4 year bachelor with 3.0 GPA from Big Name College XYZ with my boss CCed.

My boss quickly replied, before I had time to go "WTF?!", that I indeed had such a degree.

Needless to say, him and I had a little talk afterward. That was awkward.

The type of degree isn't relevant for a lot of stuff, especially when it comes to immigration or certain employers.

In this case, that employer worked simply with post-secondary years, and counted a master as 6 and PhD as 10. So someone who did 2 bachelors in 6 years was equivalent to someone with a master. What happened before that, or which country or type of degree you had, was irrelevent.

For immigration, its total years of schooling. So how long high school takes in your particular country is relevant. h

I got a BS and MS from a here to be un-named University. A few weeks before graduation, I also got a parking ticket, which I contested. I got an un-official copy of my 6 years of transcripts before the ticket was done with the appeals system. I got my first job without even showing the unofficial transcripts, worked there for 12 years while the Uni sent me probably 100 letters demanding $20 payment for the ticket, informing me that my records are frozen until such time as the ticket is paid.

Like you say, falsifying information on your resume or application is a terminable offense at most businesses. This means that it is often illegal, just not in the State of Federal jurisdiction for Law. This means that lying on a resume may not get you put in jail or cost you a hefty fine, but being unemployed is almost as bad (especially when you can't use the former employer as a reference).

Not all options actually hug the tradeoff curve(well, in three variables, I suppose it's some sort of surface; but same idea) all that closely (if at all), so it's still a partially legitimate question... (Which state school is basically north of 10k/yr for beer pong and date rape and which one is an affordable and decent college? Is that ad for SOMEBODY TECHNICAL INSTITUTE a total scam? How much of the expense of a traditional campus can I skip without ending up in a 'MOOC' that might as well just be watching a couple of youtube videos, only more expensive?).

That said, I'd be...a trifle nervous... about anyone who "eh, just wants to get a fast, cheap, CS degree, y'know?". Unless you have purely mercenary motives(and a fairly solid estimate of how much more you could be earning if you had one from a school of a given caliber, in which case crunch the cost of going to school, opportunity and direct, compare to expected increased future earnings, and go on your value-rational-homo-economicus way...), you don't get a CS degree, definitely not a CS degree that you wouldn't be ashamed of, just for the CV.

If you are already a programmer, you know enough about CS-like things that 'CS for enrounding you as a person and enrichment' will be irrelevant, so you have two choices: Do you want to take actual, big-kid, CS for people who want a better grasp of a deeply hairy area of mathematics? Or would you be better off skipping that and focusing on software engineering/development related skills that will make your practical-applied-programming more solid, more maintainable, generally better on the logistics side?

Hard math just seems like a bad place for dabblers: If you just skate, you'll be wasted on anybody who just wants a coder, now(since they don't care about your fancy theoretical education, just your work experience); and equally wasted on anybody who wants to pick your brain, see how you think; because faking knowledge of hard subjects is hard.

I've thought about going back to school for a CS degree. I've been working the field for about 20 years, and I still don't have a degree. "fast, cheap, and high quality" would be exactly what I want. I don't have the time to spend 2 to 4 years pursuing a degree. It would just be a stupid choice for me right now. I can stop working, or reduce my hours to get my degree, so I can pretty much get right back into the job I already have at the same payrate, but then I'll have new student loans to pay off.

This guy is in a situation where he knows how to do the job, but some HR person wants to see a check next to the "BS" line. Yes, the BS line. Quality isn't important so long as he can legitimately put BS CS on his resume.

My brother is in construction and they won't promote him further without a bachelors. What kind? Doesn't matter, really. He just needs to get a degree from somewhere accredited, the sooner the better, so some paper-pusher can approve it

Yea, I was going through Computer Learning Center back in the 80's. Couldn't even get a glance from IBM but the person with a 4 year degree in Animal Husbandry got an offer. Even though I did much better in the classes and even taught one session for extra credit.

Frankly, with all of the job experience on the OP's resume, a degree mill is not a bad way to get a legitimate line on the resume. I had an associates degree, went to the local branch of the state university, and realized I'd be graduating with my kids if I stuck with that route. I sucked it up, plunked down the money to buy my degree in 15 months worth of classes, and now HR departments everywhere will pass that portion of the resume filter.

For most jobs in theory you can just fake your degrees. But if you get caught you are often in deep doo-doo, as lying on your resume is a bad thing.

Man don't say things like that. That is a good way to get a major black spot in your resume. This business is smaller than some people realize. Next time you try getting a job it will probably be of the kind where you say 'do you want that with fries or not?'.

For most jobs in theory you can just fake your degrees. But if you get caught you are often in deep doo-doo, as lying on your resume is a bad thing.

Man don't say things like that. That is a good way to get a major black spot in your resume.

Nonsense. Even if you get caught (unlikely), there is very little chance that it will hurt you in your next interview. Do you really think HR people have nothing better to do than to build and maintain blacklists for the benefit of their competitors?

I'm not an HR flack (Thank the nonexistent deities of a thousand dead pantheons); but I'd guess that, if HR (or anybody else who felt like quietly dropping the dime on you for some reason at any point during your tenure...) was feeling nasty, testing for degree mills would be easier than testing for fake or overstated degrees.

Thanks to some combination of FERPA and the Office of the Bursar's desire to extract fees, actually getting the details of a student's stay at a given school is a pain. By contrast,

I've never understood the point of a degree from a non-accredited institution. If the university isn't accredited, I'd probably be better off licensing an official Miskatonic University degree plaque from HP Lovecraft's estate.

The parent nailed it. I'd see about the reimbursement item.

Also, sometimes OS certificates can get one in the door as well. A CCIE can get one in the door, similar with a MCSE. For the tech people, it doesn't mean as much, but the HR department are the people that round-file resum

I took three. I did 90 credits at Mesa Community College, who operates a very solid Cisco Network Academy affiliate, and 30 credits at Northern Arizona University for my bachelors in IT Management. Both are public colleges and accredited. It's cheap because you get the discount community college rates for 90 credits, and then only have to do the core credits for the university portion (skipping all of the fluff such as liberal arts, because they recognize that you already did the fluff at community college;

You often can get a decent rate at part time taking some classes at your local state University. You can often take classes before you are admitted to the school. Usually after you prove that you know your stuff and get a few good grades, the school will normally let you in the program.

As for experience. Experience does matter, however from my own personal experience hiring developers, a college education usually gets employees that don't have those odd holes in their skills, which makes bringing up to speed sometimes a little more difficult.These gaps vary from person to person... However some of the common ones are.1. Not understanding details of data structures. Why am I getting a negative number when it is clearly 5 billion!2. Recursion seems magical. I admit it, in college it took me a bit to get Recursion, after a class in LISP it cleared it right up. Also when you get the details realizing how often the system is stacking stuff together means there is a limit on how much Recursion magic you can do.3. IPC (Inter Process Communications) Dealing with threads can get sketchy if you don't have a way to get them to talk.4. Complex Boolean logic with short circuit evaluation. Yep after that one function returned true that second function won't run in your or clause. You know that one for some reason you made to update some data.

Now for those of you without degree who feel insulted by this, don't be this is what I find are often the most common issues. There are a lot of really good developers without degrees, many who I will admit who could kick my butt at coding. But for a company trying to hire, it is normally better to weed out some good employees then it is to hire a bad one.

5: Locks and integrity. You have two threads updating one variable. Without some sort of transaction/lock/mutex/semaphore system, one can get very unpredictable results. This is a subset of #3 above, but variable manipulation can be a basic thing overlooked.

6: Choosing the proper variable type in a strongly typed language. Yes, one can always use long doubles for every floating point calculation, similar with long longs... but when a counter never gets past 16, it wastes space. Yes,

As you noted #5 was a subset of #3Also I would say #6 is a subset of #1. If you don't understand data structures those long doubles and long longs seems like the best choice if you really don't know why there are so many different types.

First off, make sure your Associates degree is a transferable associates degree. The fact that you say it is in "Programming and Systems Analysis" instead of just Associates in Arts or Associates in Science leads me to believe it isn't a very transferable degree. You would have needed things like 3 communications classes (English, Speech, etc), 6 behavioral sciences / humanities courses, 2 science classes, and 2 math classes. If it is a transferable degree, then you are half way there.

If it is not transferable, you can try to use CLEP tests to get past many required classes. I was able to get past two humanities courses that weren't part of my associates this way. If you can't pass the tests because you are a bad test taker or something, community college classes are your best bet. It will be easy to pass those classes but it will take a while this way.

If you aren't able to go to college for two years during daytime hours, it will be a bit harder to finish the last 60 credit hours. When I needed a BS while working in 2009 I was forced to use University of Phoenix, but now there are many better options at real schools. I followed up my BS with an MS at a real school, so I didn't mind going to a degree mill. But a quick internet search can find numerous online BS programs at real brick and mortar schools.

I do not suggest going to a diploma mill unless you are going to follow up with a real MS. The government is likely to start cracking down on programs like UoP and Devry soon, and those schools will probably obtain even worse reputations than they already have when that happens. That said, I did get a job with a 50% pay increase by just listing I was 12 credit hours away from my UoP BS degree, so it was useful to me all by itself (my boss later confirmed my resume would never have reached her desk if I hadn't listed I was close to my BS).

It isn't "IT", but there are degrees in IS, along the lines of business management. This is another path, likely a profitable one since it gets one closer to PM/PHB types of jobs... those are the jobs that will stay even after the corporate axemen come to visit with the pink slips.

I had a similar though, fast and cheap is the wrong mindset. Sit down and research the local (or online) schools and degree programs available to you. Dig into the courses and see what topics are taught. Look for a program that will compliment your career goals. Some schools may accept your associates degree coursework, but make sure you ask up front since credits do expire. You are probably looking at a minimum of 2 years to complete a decent program. It could be a long, miserable road if you pick a

My resume doesn't have any education listed on it either. It never has. Knowing the subject matter is far more important than the piece of paper saying I spent a few years at a school.

If they ask about it, I only discuss it loosely. Yes, I have gone to college. No, I don't have a degree. I started working, and stayed with working rather than school. I've never been pressed for any educational details, like what college/university, how long, etc, etc.

WTF? A guy wants a degree on his resume to enhance his employment opportunities and you suggest that he blow his head off? What the hell's the matter with you?
"Perk" is defined as 'an advantage or benefit following from a job or situation.'
Which pretty much describes the OP's intent. Just because he is interested in the practical outcomes of having a degree rather than worshiping at the Holy Altar of the Ivory Tower you think he should end his life?